Back | Next
Contents

* * *

Rafiel tried to call a couple of times. No answer. Stubborn dragon, he told himself, about his friend, with something between annoyance and admiration. That Tom wasn't answering Kyrie might or might not make sense. She didn't seem to think they had argued, but Rafiel's experience of women—his mother, aunts and girl cousins included—told him that just because a woman thought that, it didn't mean the man she had emphatically not argued with thought the same.

He drove slowly down Fairfax seeing no movement, let alone movement by someone in jeans and a black T-shirt. Tom had black hair. He should have stood out like a sore thumb.

Unless, of course, he's passed out by the side of the road and covered in a mound of snow, in which case he is pretty much white. Rafiel felt a tightening in his stomach at the thought. How long could a dragon survive hypothermia? In either form? Oh, okay, so they were hard to kill, but was freezing one of the ways they could be killed? He didn't know. And it wasn't as if he was going to go in search of Dante Dire to ask him.

Dante Dire presented the other problem. Because Kyrie hadn't said anything about looking for two people, one following the other, he presumed that Conan hadn't gone with Tom. That meant Tom was out there without his human security cam. What if the bad guys had found him first? While Rafiel had got the idea that Dante Dire was cringingly afraid of the Great Sky Dragon, he didn't get the feeling that he was even vaguely impaired by moral considerations or feelings that he should not kill. Particularly—he suspected—no feelings that he should not kill dragons.

As stupid as it was that Dante Dire, sent to investigate the death of shifters, would end up killing shifters to get them out of his way, Rafiel suspected that this was a nobody picks on my little brother but me matter. After all, the Great Sky Dragon, supposed protector of all dragons, had killed at least one of their members in Goldport. The police had processed the body and Rafiel was sure he had been bitten in two in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. And the Great Sky Dragon had damn well near killed Tom, too, for all his new interest in protecting him.

Rafiel had now gone all the way to the west end of Fairfax. He turned around and started driving the other way, slowly. A movement from a doorway called his attention. It looked khaki, not black, but considering everything, perhaps with the snow it just looked that way.

Hopeful, he pulled up to the curb, stopped the car, jiggled a little in his seat, just to make sure at least one of his wheels wasn't on solid ice, parked and set the parking brake. "Hey there," he called to the indistinct, blurred form in the doorway.

The form stirred. Almost immediately, Rafiel realized it couldn't be Tom. This was someone older with white hair, probably taller and bulkier than Tom, though that was hard to tell, as he was huddled in the doorway with one of those Mylar space blankets over most of his body save for his shoulders and head. The flash of khaki was from the shoulders, covered in some sort of jacket. He looked at Rafiel from bleary eyes half hidden under unkempt bangs.

"Uh . . ." Rafiel said, jiggling his keys in his pocket. "Do you want a ride to a shelter?"

The eyes widened. "No shelter," he said, with something very akin to fear. He shook his head and rustled the corner of his shiny silver coverings. "I got my blanket."

"Oh. All right," Rafiel said. The man didn't seem drunk, but he seemed as averse to going into a shelter as, say, Tom or Kyrie or himself would have been. Rafiel sniffed the air, smelling nothing, but he wasn't sure he would have smelled anything as cold as it was. He would swear his ability to smell had frozen with his nose. Perhaps, he thought, he should come back and smell the man later. And, as the inanity of the thought struck, he snorted. Yeah, because he really needed to find another charity case for Tom. Old Joe wasn't enough. "Hey," he said, on impulse. "Did you see a guy go by here? About yea tall, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt? Black hair about shoulder long or a little longer?" How was it possible that he was suddenly so unsure of Tom's hair length? He almost sighed in exasperation at himself. Yes, Kyrie was far more interesting to look at, but he should have noticed his best male friend's hair length.

"I told him he needed a jacket," the old transient man said and nodded.

"Uh. You did? Good call."

"Yeah, he was going that way," the man said, pointing west. "If you are looking for him, going that way"—he pointed east, the direction Rafiel was now headed—"won't help."

"Right, but see, I went miles on Fairfax and I didn't—"

"He was looking for Old Joe," the derelict said. "Him that thinks he can be a gator? I told him last I heard Old Joe was headed for the aquarium. I don't know what he meant to do at the aquarium, though."

The aquarium, yeah, that would be like Tom. Let cryptozoology zanies take over the local paper. Let them get pictures of creatures that shouldn't possibly exist fighting it out in the parking lot of the aquarium. Tom, who shifted into one of the creatures, would immediately feel honor bound to go the aquarium. Why didn't I think of it before? "Thanks," he told the old man. "I'll . . . get you a coffee or something."

The man smiled, revealing very brown teeth. "Why, that would be very nice of you."

Back in the car, Rafiel turned around. The aquarium. What are the odds?

But it was a few minutes' drive there, at the most, and it wasn't as though he didn't have excuses he could give for being on the grounds. He turned onto Ocean Street and started driving slowly around the parking lot. And caught a flash of a black T-shirt—or mostly black, as it seemed mottled in white—as the person wearing it stepped off the garden path and disappeared from view.

Yeah, Tom, Rafiel thought, with a mix of concern and annoyance. Because who else would think that late in the evening, in the middle of a snowstorm, is a good time to go explore the garden of the aquarium?

Still, he wasn't at all sure and couldn't do more than hope that it was indeed Tom, as he parked on the street and jumped out. He ran across the garden, ice and—presumably—frozen grass crackling under his feet. "Tom," he yelled. "Tom."

And then he hit a patch of ice, and his feet went out from under him.

 

Back | Next
Framed